It's easier to be a tranny

Wednesday 16 July 2003 23:00 BST

From upstairs a laughing voice shouts. "You can go through my undies drawer while you're waiting ..." Grayson Perry is having his photograph taken.

I am waiting in a small, scented boudoir, as fluffy and pastel as the rest of the house is screamingly red in its general colour scheme. On an elegant white iron bed, pink cushions, flowery straw hat, teddy and beribboned Bo-peep doll are piled in a neat pyramid.

Hairspray and mascara declare this room to belong to a highly feminine creature, though the scattered lids and spilt bottles indicate a certain laxity verging on the male.

"This is Claire's room," Perry explains when he emerges, dressed in khaki trousers and white T-shirt. His helmet of blond hair matches that of Camilla Parker Bowles.

His manner is straightforward, humorous. Perry, 43, one of this year's Turner-Prize short-listed artists and maker of raunchy pictorial fantasy ceramics, is also a transvestite. He prides himself on his masculinity and grins in mock-horror at the thought of being mistaken, as he often is, as gay.

Claire is his alter ego, the name chosen when he joined a cross-dressing organisation years ago and had to have a pseudonym. Now, in more liberal times, he is often to be seen at art openings dolled up to the nines and looking, well, like a strong man dressed up as a woman.

"Yes, it's me in a frock, not me thinking I'm a woman. I used to walk down Oxford Street dressed as an ordinary woman and no one turned a hair. The deceit wasn't the point. The purpose was to externalise the subconscious. But nowadays I prefer the little-girl look, all frills and bows. It's about me, the mirror and the camera.

In the early days, when I was a student at Portsmouth Poly, I was a bit scared - skinheads used to jeer. Now it's easier. People know me as a transvestite potter. You could say dressing up gave me a high tolerance of suburban naffness."

This neatly gnomic remark makes sense of an Essex childhood. When Perry was five, his father was edged out by the milkman, also a wrestler and a violent figure, who became his stepfather. In a montage about art and childhood, commissioned by the Terrence Higgins Trust for a charity auction tonight, he writes: "All my positive male qualities I loaded on to my teddy bear. This bear, Alan Measles, was the unfailing, invulnerable leader of my imaginary kingdom. He ... was never killed despite being shot down countless times in bedroom dogfights."

This was the start of his lifelong obsession with sexual roleplaying-"In my teens I drew strip-cartoons where macho heroes get into tricky situations and the only way to escape was to dress up as a woman."

Yet this gender struggle had a positive outcome. Pottery has long been looked down on as a lowly, predominantly female craft. Perry also works with textiles and embroidery, similarly disregarded. "I never had those prejudices. When I left college it was the bish, bash, bosh period of big, splashy art - Kiefer, Baselitz, Schnabel. To be tiddlywiddly precious was an absolute no-no. It's been far harder coming out as a craftsman than a tranny."

He is engaged with each stage of production, making about 20 pots a year. "I do the whole thing from mud to masterpiece. A lot of artists do art by phone. I always have the feeling that Damien Hirst, bless his little cotton socks and, what's that other one, Mona Hatoum, ring up their fabricators and say: 'I'd like a great big cock made in gold, 20ft-long. See you at the opening. Bye.' Fair enough. That's the way they work and they're unapologetic. I don't; I suppose I'm old-fashioned."

While his pots tend to be traditional in shape, the subject matter is, in his words, "very dressed". Images of lipsticks, stilettos, Kalashnikovs and bombs overlap, creating a compost of meaning. Phallic imagery is ever present. Tonight he will take part in a debate at The Institute of Contemporary Arts entitled The Most Singular Pleasure.

"It's weird there is such a taboo about masturbation. It doesn't do any harm and people still call you a wanker whether you do or don't.

"My signature on pots is a W on top of an anchor. Why? Because it's funny. It's a take on a venerable Chelsea porcelain mark. And I've done a piece called Moonlit Wankers [owned by Charles Saatchi]. Of course, the whole idea is seedy. I produce about a zillion seeds every day. I have sex with my wife and I masturbate. Two different things with the same result."

All the above is said between chortles. He is not one to resist double-entendre. "Someone made an educational film about me recently. But they said we'll have to pan over the penises - which is more or less all my work - or the girls in the classroom will start giggling. Anyway, they did pan over them.

"I use penises because I've got one and it crops up in many subjects I'm interested in. I'm not trying to do art to shock. It's all serious, and not cynical."

Everyone, he believes, has fetishes. By talking so freely about his own, he makes them seem normal. Inhabitants of his Islington square no longer take much notice of their exotic neighbour. "I don't think you're born a tranny," he says.

"There are aspects of yourself you sense as a child that are not welcome - say, if you're a man, the desire to be sweet, vulnerable - the things you'd associate with someone wearing a dress. Sexual drive is a huge engine in my creativity. There's a kind of narrative to my sexuality."

What does that mean? "You would have to ask my therapist." He is married to one, and has an 11-year-old daughter.

What does she think? "She's cool. She's already outed me to the headmistress at her new school. She said, 'My dad's an artist.' So they had a look on the website ... The other day one of her schoolmates said, 'Yeuch, your dad's face is red.' She said, 'Oh, he's always like that when he's wiped his make-up off from the night before.' She has already learned that embarrassment is just a fantasy you have of what other people are thinking about you."

The show for the Turner Prize in October, for which the Chapman Brothers are also nominated, will include existing work and a new vase called A Lovely Consensus, depicting 50 top art collectors.

"These people don't trust their eyes. They say this is bad art then they read the CV and suddenly change their mind. Now that really aggravates me. Actually, I used to have a really whacking great fantasy about winning the Turner Prize ..."

The Most Singular Pleasure is at the ICA (020 7930 3647) tonight; Terrence Higgins Trust auction, also tonight, is at The Business Design Centre, N1 (0870 4420328).